Since forming in 2023, local emo outfit Surprise Soup have built a strong following across more than 200 shows — many of them at their own DIY space in East Boulder. Credit: Ariana Cord
Boulder might not be the first place that springs to mind on the topic of robust DIY music scenes. With a few notable exceptions, the house-show whisper network that traditionally fosters young punk and indie bands hasn’t been a major part of life in a college town where exorbitant housing costs drive working artists elsewhere.
That’s why CU student Graeme Laurent, guitarist in the rising Front Range emo outfit Surprise Soup, launched a new warehouse venue called Unit 5. The bare-bones East Boulder spot opened last summer on the heels of Punk Standard, a local collective facilitating rowdy, all-ages shows in non-traditional spaces — including The Coffee Stand on Arapahoe Avenue, which briefly hosted a series of high-profile gigs in late 2024, and Wesley Foundation United Methodist Church.
“I wanted there to be a standalone place that could be kind of a home base where you’re safe from getting kicked out,” Laurent, 22, tells Caribou Current ahead of the band’s headlining gig at Fox Theatre on Aug. 21. “Something breaks at the coffee shop, you get kicked out. Something breaks at the church, you get kicked out. That was kind of the big thing.”
This homespun DIY haven would become the site of Surprise Soup’s first full-length offering, Live at Unit 5. Capturing the quartet’s exuberant fusion of Midwest emo and math rock, marked by shifting time signatures and elastic twinkling guitars that refuse to sit still, the 13 tracks released in February buzz with the restless joie de vivre of their high-energy live shows.
“Recording in the studio didn’t always translate to how we sound live,” explains 35-year-old bassist and Denver resident Marco Ramirez. “When we play live, there’s a lot of improvisation. There are all these moments where we might be messing up, but to everyone else it sounds like we’re doing something intentional.”
Surprise Soup’s penchant for improv sets them apart from many of their peers in the emo scene, while marking them as a distinctly Colorado enterprise. You might not mistake their jittery riffs and high-strung vocals for the jam band stylings that dominate local bills, but there’s more connective tissue between the two than meets the eye.
“I was in a bluegrass band and a lot of college bands where it was just mainly jamming,” says vocalist and guitarist Sean Perman, 26. “So when we started this band, we wanted to make sure we could jam well together. It’s like a conversation where you really should be listening to the other people — if you’re not doing that, it’s kind of a rude conversation where you’re the only one talking.”
Take the band’s latest single, “Mountain Soup,” a wild and wiry studio cut reflecting their dialogic approach to songcraft. Without breaking the three-minute mark, the studio track shifts from riffy pop-punk approachability into a shimmering pool of reverb before steering the conversation back to a brain-tickling guitar coda that bends itself into impossible shapes.
“For me, it’s the way the songs drive,” Ramirez says. “We’ll be going super fast, and then we’ll drop in dynamic to give it all this space, like a floaty feeling. The atmosphere we create is an important part of what we do.”
Whether Surprise Soup and their homegrown venue can turn the tide on Boulder’s DIY ennui remains an open question. But the group is hopeful that offering a space for like-minded artists to sharpen their sensibilities will inspire the next crop of music acts in a community whose counter-culture heyday is feeling more like a distant memory with each passing year.
“I think it’s important not only for pre-existing bands to solidify their sound in a specific scene, but also for new bands,” Laurent says. “That’s especially true in a college town, where you’re getting thousands of new people every year with incoming freshman classes who are going to go to these shows and start their own alternative bands.”
So goes the alchemy that has guided local music scenes since the squall of the punk revolution in the late 1970s. For these four musicians who have bonded across more than 200 shows over the last three years, the formula for carrying the torch is pretty simple.
“It’s lasted so long because we all get along, which is a super important part,” Perman says. “It’s not just playing the music — it’s everything around it. Like, can you spend hundreds of hours with these guys and like it? I think we’re almost like brothers at this point.”
ON THE BILL: Surprise Soup + Precocious Neophyte, Exhaler and Shorts. 7:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 21, Fox Theatre, 1135 13th St., Boulder. $23
